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Publication

Design and Control of a Quasi-Direct Drive Robotic Gripper for Collision Tolerant Picking at High Speed

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

Faster robotic picking of objects can improve
industrial production throughput. A gripper design with appropriate
control strategy is demonstrated to pick objects at
high speed, while being tolerant to unintentional collisions.
The design has a quasi–direct drive with backdrivable, rigid
finger mechanism to transfer collision forces with minimal delay
towards the motor side. These forces are detected based on
band–pass filtered momentum and motor speed monitoring.
The motor velocity is observed through Kalman filtering in order
to reduce noise in the low–level control loop and band–pass
momentum observer, resulting in a higher collision detection
sensitivity. On a higher level, the path of the gripper is planned
with respect to the trade–off picking speed versus collision
tolerance, quantified by the remaining gripper stroke upon
impact. The gripper collision tolerance was experimentally
verified in several scenarios during high–speed object picking
where it mitigated collisions up to 0.6 m/s.
Journal: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
ISSN: 2377-3766
Issue: 3
Volume: 7
Pages: 7692-7699
Publication year:2022
Accessibility:Open